Clouzot: The Early Works (My Cousin from Warsaw) [Blu-ray]Blu-ray A - America - Kino Lorber
Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (18th December 2018).

The Film

"Before directing his first feature, Henri-Georges Clouzot spent ten years learning the ropes. During this prolific period as a screenwriter, he learned cinematic grammar and began to forge his style. To better know and understand Henri-Georges Clouzot, you have to discover these rare films, of which he was one of the principal architects. Kino Classics and Lobster Films are proud to present CLOUZOT: THE EARLY YEARS, which collects six varied features he worked on from 1931-1933: frothy comedies, boxing dramas, musicals and melodramas. The set also includes his directorial debut - the short film The Terror of Batignolles (1931), which anticipates his canonical thrillers to come."

I'll Be Alone At Midnight is dedicated to those perpetrators of "crimes of passion." When her philandering husband (Roger Blum) walks out in the middle of an argument, Monique Argilliers (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg's Mireille Perrey) decides to get even by having an affair of her own. She turns down pining longtime friend Michel (Les Bonnes Femmes' Pierre Bertin) and instead buys a bunch of balloons and lets them lose over Paris with the note "I'll be alone after midnight." Michel desperately tries to capture one and gets himself arrested for firing his gun in public to shoot one of the balloons down. As midnight nears, he is still stuck at booking while the other balloon recipients â a sailor, a workaholic who hopes to make his train after an assignation, a military guard abandoning his post for a date, an angler, a nurseryman, a jazz musician who uses his instrument to speak, and a clerk. Monique meets them all at once, and then takes them all along when Michel calls her to vouch for him. She decides to leave her choice of lover to chance, but fate keeps steering her towards one man.

The scenarios and original scripts for the other two films in the set, Tell Me Tonight and Dream Castle, did not originate with Clouzot, who wrote the French-language adaptations, but their use of mistaken and assumed identities seemed to have resonated with him as far as his own short film directorial debute The Terror of Batignolles in which the titular thief (Boucot Fils) breaks into an apartment just before its owners come home. Sensing that they are not alone, the pair (The Pearls of the Crown's Germaine Aussey and Elevator to the Gallows's Jean Wall) melodramatically consider various murder-suicide scenarios in order to frighten him out of hiding and fleece him not only of what he has taken but souvenirs from his previous thefts. Satisfied that the couple are not going to take their lives, he takes his leave only for Clouzot to pull a reversal. Just as with the other two pairings, Tell Me Tonight feels like the inferior effort, with Dream Castle not burdened by musical numbers and dependent upon dialogue and exchanges to convey the charisma of its young leads as well as indulging in more sustained comedy. Clouzot would follow his short with two features that are unavailable here â although the casting of Kiepura in Tout pour l'amour (also a Gaumont co-production with a British English-language version simultaneously produced and attempting to make Kiepura an international star along with the other simultaneous productions J'aime toutes les femmes/Ich liebe alle Frauen and My Heart is Calling/Mon coeur t'appelle before his single American outing for Paramount: Give Us This Night) suggests it may be another musical comedy â but he would continue to hone his writing throughout the thirties before his more characteristic and well-received third feature The Murderer Lives at Number 21.

Hiss is most apparent throughout The Unknown Singer, especially during the musical numbers, while the clarity of the lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono tracks also reveals the roughness of the era's sound recording with some offscreen voices sounding like they are coming from a telephone receiver and some distortion in the high ends (including some shrill female voices). The optional English subtitles are free of errors, and they reveal that Tell Me Tonight's utterance of the titular song is translated under its actual title.

Extras

There are no extras on the discs â Clouzot's The Terror of Batignolles is listed in the main menu of the first disc with the other three films â but a booklet by film critic Peter Tonguette is housed in the case.

Overall

Although it features only one directorial effort - a short amidst six feature films - Clouzot: The Early Works allows the viewer to see how the director of Les Diaboliques and The Wages of Fear paid his dues.

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